Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  Alexander’s face went stiff. He was older in that instant, almost an old man. He held on to Lily for another second while her screams tore into both of them and then, so painfully that it dug deep lines beside his mouth, he handed her back to Julia. Lily buried her face at once against her mother’s neck. Even as Julia hugged her Alexander leaned foward. He rested his cheek against the back of Lily’s head, closing his eyes, and then he straightened up again.

  ‘I’ll bring her back again, you know,’ he said dully. ‘Her home is here, at Ladyhill. But once you go, you don’t come back.’

  It wasn’t a threat. It seemed more a statement of the truth that they both recognised. To Alexander, the words rang with a dull familiarity.

  ‘I don’t want to come back.’ Somehow Julia picked up the luggage again, and she struggled to the front door.

  It was very cold outside. Over her head the sky was pearl-coloured, and in the west the sun floated like an angry red eye in a pink sea.

  Alexander’s car was parked on the gravel between the dark yew trees. Hastily, afraid that he would follow and stop them, Julia bundled Lily into the back seat. She wedged her in with the suitcases and then clambered into the driver’s seat. Alexander always left the keys in the ignition. As the car swung away Julia realised, with a touch of panic, that she didn’t even know the way to get to London. She had only been driving for a few months, no further than to the nearby towns, for shopping. When they were together, Alexander always drove.

  She felt even colder with the recognition of how dependent on him she had become.

  I’ll have to learn to be independent again, won’t I?

  ‘Tell you what, Lily,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ll drive to the station and catch the London train. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’

  ‘Ooo, train,’ Lily beamed.

  As they turned the corner in the driveway Julia knew that the windows of the house would be reflecting the blaze of the setting sun again. But she didn’t look back to see.

  Alexander listened until he couldn’t hear the Mini any longer. Then, aloud, he said, ‘I do love you.’

  It was too late to say it now, of course. Alexander knew that it was his failing, to leave the most important assurances until too late. He threw the screwdriver down, and it rolled away across the floor. As he walked back into the drawing room he remembered why the earlier words had seemed familiar. His father had said exactly the same thing to China, at the end of one of their chilly battles. ‘Once you go, you don’t come back.’

  He must have been eight or so, he thought, because he had just come home from prep school for the summer holidays. He had listened, frozen, outside the door. The curious thing was that he couldn’t remember now whether China ever had come back to Ladyhill. After that all he could remember was the fun of staying at her flat in Town, and how he had imagined that his father’s house missed her.

  Alexander looked across the drawing room. At the far end, under the propped-up tree in a brilliant, coiled snake, the fairy lights twinkled at him.

  Julia parked the car neatly in the station yard. She gave the keys to the station master telling him that Alexander would collect them, and led Lily across to the ticket window. It was then she realised that in her haste she had come without her cheque-book. But she had enough money with her for a ticket to London, and a taxi to Mattie’s. Once she had reached Mattie, then she could stop and think.

  The train was a slow one, and it was packed with Christmas travellers. Wrapped presents protruded from their bags, and a man in the corner of the compartment brought in a miniature fir tree and stowed it on the luggage rack. Lily sat on Julia’s lap. She was cheerful and content at first, but as the train crawled on towards London she became irritable, then hungry. Julia had brought no food with her, and there was no buffet on the train. An old woman sitting opposite offered her an apple, and Lily devoured it. At Reading, Julia jumped off the train and bought some milk from the platform buffet. It was after nine o’clock when they reached Paddington, tired and stiff and hungry. Lily hung in Julia’s arms, her arms clasped around her neck. They queued for a long time for a taxi.

  ‘We’ll soon be at Mattie’s now,’ Julia murmured. ‘Then you can have a nice hot drink and a big sleep.’

  They reached the head of the queue at last and their taxi threaded through the evening traffic, past the avenues of glittering shops. Julia looked at the people and the lights, and sighed with a sense of homecoming.

  When they reached Mattie’s street she jumped out of the taxi and stood on the black and white tiles in front of the dairy with her finger on Mattie’s doorbell. She stood for a long moment, waiting and then ringing again, and it was only then that she began to be afraid. She stepped back and looked up at the windows.

  They were all dark.

  Mattie was out. Julia knew that she wasn’t in a show, but of course Mattie would be out anyway. It was Christmas. As soon as she had accepted the obvious, Julia wondered at her own stupidity. She had been concentrating so hard on reaching Mattie that she hadn’t even taken the time to telephone. Julia felt, suddenly, that her last support had been swept away. She had just about enough money in her purse to meet the figure on the taxi meter, and Lily’s round white face was staring at her from the back seat. They were on their own, in London. It was Christmas, and they had no money. Suddenly it didn’t feel like home at all. Unwelcome, unbidden, the memory of the Savoy doorway came back to Julia. The smell, and the shuffling figures passing up and down in the night’s anonymity.

  ‘I’m afraid my friend seems to be out,’ she said.

  ‘Where to then, miss?’ the driver asked, not unkindly.

  Julia took a deep breath, and then she rattled off the Eaton Square address. She wouldn’t telephone there, either. If Felix wasn’t at home either, well, she would worry about it when they arrived.

  When they reached the square she counted off the house numbers, anxiously, as they rattled past them. And then she saw that the tall drawing room windows of the right house were brightly lit behind the elegant first floor balcony.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she muttered, and as the cab pulled up again, ‘Could you just wait?’ She hoisted Lily into her arms and ran into the house and up the wide stairs. George Tressider’s door was opened by a man who looked like a butler.

  Julia blinked. ‘I’m looking for Felix. Is he at home?’

  The man was suitably imperturbable. ‘Of course, madam. If you would follow me.’

  Lily began to cry. Along the thickly carpeted corridor, Julia heard music and a babble of voices. They followed the butler towards the noise. He paused, and then flung open the double doors in front of them.

  Julia saw a crowd of people. There were cocktail dresses and quite a lot of serious jewels, and men in dark suits or dinner jackets. There were oval silver dishes of complicated canapés, a white and silver Christmas tree, and, right in front of her, George himself in a bottle-green velvet dinner jacket and matching bow tie. George and Felix were giving a Christmas party.

  ‘Julia. This is a nice surprise,’ George said.

  And in the warm, scented room Julia knew that she was grubby and crumpled from the train, that she was white-faced and wild-haired, and that the crying child in her arms was exhausted and bewildered. Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at them, wondering at their bad taste in materialising here and now.

  ‘It’s a surprise, anyhow,’ Julia answered. Her voice was wobbly, but bright. And then she saw Felix. He came out of the crowd and kissed her on both cheeks, as if he had been expecting her all evening.

  ‘I expect Lily would like something first, wouldn’t she?’ he murmured. And he led them away into the kitchen. It was empty except for a maid in a black dress. When she had gone out with another tray of food, Felix asked gently, ‘What’s happened?’

  Looking straight at him over Lily’s black head, Julia answered, ‘I’ve made a mess of everything. I’ve done everything wrong, and I know what’s happened is my faul
t. I don’t want to do any more wrong, that’s all. I’ve left Alexander, because all we can do is hurt each other.’ It was then that her face crumpled. ‘I’ve got a taxi downstairs, and I haven’t even got enough money to pay it off. And it’s your party. I’m sorry, Felix.’

  To her amazement, and relief, and gratitude, Felix laughed. ‘I can, at least, pay the taxi for you.’ In the doorway, he turned back to her. ‘Do you remember what I said, after Lily was born?’

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘I said, that if you needed me you would know where to find me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ he smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you found me. Party or not.’

  ‘Thank you, Felix.’

  When he had gone Julia lowered Lily on to a spindly scarlet stool. Then she felt her way around the immaculate kitchen, between the bottles of champagne, finding a saucepan and a pint of milk and a clean tea towel. With the tea towel she wiped the train dirt and the tears off Lily’s cheeks and kissed her.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘We’ll be all right. Because we’ve got friends, you see. We’re lucky. Very, very lucky.’

  When Felix and the maid came back, simultaneously, they found Julia sipping a mug of hot milk and Lily fast asleep with her head against her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘She was so tired,’ Julia said softly, ‘she couldn’t even stay awake long enough to drink her milk.’

  Seventeen

  It was even darker inside the flat than at the bottom of the basement stairwell outside. The three of them bumped against Lily’s pushchair and peered ahead into the gloom.

  ‘There must be a light switch somewhere,’ Felix muttered. A second later he found it, and they blinked in the light of the bare overhead bulb.

  ‘Power’s still on, that’s good,’ Felix said.

  They were in a small, irregularly shaped hallway with four closed doors leading off it. The walls were painted an uncompromising shade of dark, shiny green. Julia marched forward and threw the doors open, one after another. They revealed a medium-sized room and a smaller one, both with grime-coated windows looking into the well of the building. They were empty, except for some crumpled newspapers on the floor. On the other side there was a bathroom with an Ascot water heater and a deep, old-fashioned bath stained blue-green in runnels beneath the brass taps. And next to the bathroom was a surprisingly large, almost square room with two windows on to the front basement area. The street railings were visible through the top half, and the legs and feet of passers-by beyond the railings. The room was as empty as the others but it was dominated by a Thirties deco fireplace in tile and polished metal.

  Through another door at the opposite side of the room Julia discovered a cupboard of a kitchen.

  She turned in the kitchen doorway and smiled at Felix and Mattie who were hovering on either side of the monstrous fireplace. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘We’ll take it, of course. What do you think, Lily?’

  Lily scrambled out of her pushchair and wiped her hands along the tiled hearth. She held them up again, the palms black.

  ‘Dirty,’ she announced superfluously.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Julia told her. ‘I can soon clean it up, can’t I? I must start doing things for myself, now. If Lily and I are going to survive I must, mustn’t I? This seems a good place to start. Here and now.’ Her gesture took in the room, and the hallway beyond it, and the other rooms under their layers of dust.

  The necessity not only to survive, but to do so alone, without Alexander, without even Mattie and Felix, had become Julia’s obsession. She had brought Lily here, after the confusion of the days in Eaton Square and then Mattie’s Bloomsbury flat, and she determined that somehow, whatever it cost, she would make a proper life for her. She looked down at Lily. She was rolling her pushchair to and fro, crooning to her doll ensconced in her own place. Within herself, Julia didn’t doubt that they could, and would, survive. But she wanted more than that bare achievement. She wanted success, and part of that was to make Lily as happy and comfortable as she would have been if she had stayed at Ladyhill.

  It was important that Alexander should recognise that she could do it.

  Julia wanted to make a success of the future for herself and Lily more fervently than she had ever coveted the old freedom. She wanted it so much that she shivered, and her teeth chattered.

  ‘C’mon, let’s go home now. We can come back at the weekend with the floorcloths and Vim.’

  ‘Mattie, you don’t have to spend your days off doing the scrubbing here. We can move into one room easily enough, and I’ll clean up bit by bit.’

  Mattie turned round, squinting at Julia through the cigarette smoke. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ she said. It was an order that didn’t allow contradiction.

  Outside, in the raw January chill that was being whipped by a wind laden with city grit, Julia buckled Lily back into her pushchair and prepared to walk. The new flat, home, she reminded herself, was at the bottom of a gloomy red-brick mansion block to the north of Oxford Street. It lay exactly midway between the old flat in the square and Mattie’s Bloomsbury retreat. The geographical symmetry gave Julia a secure sense of place; Bloomsbury was well within walking distance, although a brisk walk. But without hesitation Mattie waved for a cab.

  As she unbuckled Lily again and wrestled with the folding pushchair, Julia wondered whether Mattie had also noticed the way that their separate decisions marked the difference between them. She supposed that Mattie, who had lately grown used to the studio sending a car and a driver to take her to work, took taxis without thinking about it. Whereas for herself, taxis were just one of the luxuries that were no longer affordable.

  Julia climbed in beside Mattie and settled Lily on her lap.

  That didn’t matter, she told herself. So long as she recognised and avoided what she couldn’t afford. Walking never hurt anyone.

  Rain spattered against the cab window. Julia leaned back, her arms around Lily, and sighed with relief. They had a home. The second urgent objective had been gained. The first had been to find a job, and George Tressider had provided that, after Felix’s coercion.

  Julia’s solicitors had warned her that unless she had a permanent source of income and somewhere secure for the two of them to live, the chances were that Alexander would be able to win custody of Lily. Equally, Alexander’s solicitors had advised him that Julia was Lily’s mother, and that the courts preferred children of divorced parents to remain with the mother.

  Unless, of course, she should happen to be homeless, feckless, or otherwise provably unfit.

  Julia and Alexander had talked on the telephone. To Julia, perched on Mattie’s bed or eyeing her own puffy face in the gilt mirror over George’s telephone table, the conversations had been almost unbearably painful.

  ‘I can’t come back to Ladyhill,’ she had said.

  ‘I’m not asking you to,’ Alexander responded stiffly. ‘I told you that, before you left. It’s Lily I want. I’m prepared to take you to court for her custody.’

  ‘Alexander, don’t do that,’ Julia had whispered. ‘It’ll cost all the money you can raise and you won’t win. I’ll see you don’t win. Use the money for your beloved Ladyhill. Don’t waste it.’ She wondered as she spoke, How can we be saying these terrible things to each other? She could see Alexander clearly, sitting at the little bureau, the shell of Ladyhill enclosing him. She said, ‘I don’t want to steal Lily from you. We can make an agreement. She can come to you, stay at Ladyhill, whenever you want her to. You’re her father. But her home must be with me. There must never be any question of that.’

  I can’t give her away, even to you. My mother gave me away. How could I do the same to Lily?

  At last, reluctantly, Alexander had agreed.

  ‘Very well. But I want a legal and binding agreement made as to the amount of time she will spend with me at Ladyhill. I expect it to be at least one-third of every year, more if Lily herself wishes it. I don’t want anything to
be subject to your whims. I don’t trust you, Julia.’

  Why should you? Julia thought. I could have trusted you, but I didn’t.

  Alexander was still talking, using his new, lawyer-like expressions. ‘If you agree to my access requirements, I will pay you for her maintenance during the rest of the year.’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what you want. The money is for Lily.’

  Alexander’s voice was cold, but Julia knew how hurt he was.

  ‘All right,’ she said sadly. ‘All right. For Lily.’

  The settlement hadn’t been completed yet. Julia knew that even her pride was misplaced. She would need whatever Alexander offered her, to feed and clothe Lily. George was not a generous payer.

  As the taxi jolted through the streets and she hung on to Lily’s Fruit Gum-sticky fingers, Julia was thinking about her own mother. In the last months her imaginings of her had changed. She had stopped dreaming of her patrician forebears and of the series of romantic misunderstandings that might have forced her mother to part with her. Now Julia imagined that her mother might have been very young and vulnerable, and alone in the world. Her arms tightened around Lily until the child wriggled and turned round to pat her face. Julia felt the links, stretching backwards, drawing her closer to the unknown woman. As she always did, whenever she thought of her, she wondered where she was and if she ever thought of the daughter she had lost.

  Mattie looked sideways at her. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t we go out and have a meal tonight? Like old times.’

  ‘It can’t be like old times. There’s Lily.’

  Julia’s retort was sharper than it might have been. But in the week that she had been staying with Mattie she had felt the difference. Mattie was playing the central role in a film called Girl at the Window. It was a big screen part for her, and it promised to bring her some real fame. The theatre was what mattered, but it was still a very small world, Mattie reasoned. The film itself was a glossy, contemporary romp and Mattie affected to disparage it. But in reality she was as committed to her work as she had been since the days with John Douglas, and she was putting real effort into investing the wide-eyed dolly of the director’s vision with some genuine emotional force. She worked long hours, and when she did come home she was exhausted but still vibrating with the day’s takes. Or else she stayed out, going to the newest clubs and laughing and drinking, and stumbling home when Julia had been asleep for hours.